


With One More Try (Can We Start Again)

by Infinite_Monkeys



Series: Fun With Time Loops [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Loki Wins, At The Beginning of the Loop At Least, Gen, Loki Makes Bad Decisions When He Thinks There Are No Consequences, POV Loki (Marvel), Some Humor, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-09 08:37:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17403638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infinite_Monkeys/pseuds/Infinite_Monkeys
Summary: Loki's attempt to conquer Earth has, to his great dismay, succeeded spectacularly. When Thanos sends him to collect the Time Stone, he strikes a deal with the Stone's keeper: he'll be sent back to the beginning of the invasion, and this time, armed with knowledge about his opponents, he can lose properly.Or: a time loop fic in which Loki does increasingly desperate things to try and get the Avengers to defeat him already.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First a Thor 1 AU, then a Jotunheim-centric fix-it fic, and now a time loop fic...I feel like I'm working my way through a checklist of "tropes I like that were popular five years ago way before I read fanfiction". Maybe someday I'll work up to the "relevant now" stuff, but that day is apparently not today.
> 
> I'm putting a warning here that there is major character death in this fic (a lot of it, actually), but because it is a time loop fic none of it sticks—hence the "temporary character death" tag. 
> 
> This is a non-commercial work of fanfiction and the rights to the characters and settings belong to Marvel. I hope you enjoy!

Earth had fallen.   
  
This was never meant to happen, was never part of the plan. _Thor_  was here, Loki had made sure of it, and Thor never lost. Certainly not to his pathetically inferior little brother.   
  
Yet Thor knelt with the rest of the so-called Avengers at Thanos' feet, his head bowed in defeat. Bright red blood ran sluggishly down his face from a cut on his forehead, dripping onto the asphalt.   
  
When he looked up, it was to fix Loki with a glare of such poisonous hatred it turned his insides cold. One of the Chitauri forced his head back down again, but the rage and betrayal and disgust in his eyes would forever be burned into Loki's mind.   
  
"You fought well," Thanos said finally into the hush that had fallen. "You should be proud."   
  
Loki knew what came next. As he waited a breathless silence fell over the air, dread and morbid anticipation hanging over him like a heavy shroud. _Not Thor, please, not him. Please._  Thanos nodded, and half the guards standing over the Earth's defenders struck. A frisson of near-pain ran through him like a tear along a seam as his little hawk fell alongside the patriotic captain, the remnants of their bond being severed, but he nearly didn't feel it.   
  
Thor. Thor with a Chitauri spear through his back. Thor's blood running to the ground, much more now than before, his hands scrabbling futilely at his armor where the pointed tip emerged from the center of his breast. The realization, the fear in his eyes, and it had to be misplaced, because Loki had never seen his brother afraid before now.   
  
_No._   
  
The world drifted out of focus. His ears were ringing, and distantly he was aware of the uproar as what remained of the Avengers reacted in shock and grief, but he could hear nothing, see nothing but the red behind his eyelids. Red like blood, like Thor's blood, and oh Norns what had he done.   
  
He only snapped back to himself when Thanos turned his attention to him. "You have done well," he said, and he reached to take the Tesseract out of Loki's nerveless fingers. He had hoped to use it somehow, to turn it against the Titan and overpower him, but it didn't seem terribly important anymore.   
  
In the background, the Chitauri began to mobilize, no doubt to extend to the rest of the Earth the same treatment given their heroes.   
  
"Now that you've proven your usefulness, I have another job for you." He crushed the Tesseract and dropped the Space Stone, now freed from its casing, into its slot on the gauntlet. "The Time Stone is here on Earth. I can feel it. You will find it and bring it to me."   
  
Loki nodded, and Thanos smiled. It was a cruel smile, one that said he knew exactly what he had done and cared nothing for the pain he had caused.   
  
"You have set my expectations high." Thanos' voice was a deep rumble, full of something that could be mistaken for warmth by someone who didn't know him well. "Do not disappoint me."   
  
"I shall not," he managed in a shaky voice.   
  
The Time Stone.   
  
The beginnings of a desperate plan began to put themselves together in his mind.   
  
It could work.   
  
It had to work.   
  
He closed his eyes, carefully locked everything he was feeling in a box in his mind marked 'not real' (and my wasn't it getting full. So many things he'd rather not acknowledge) and extended a tendril of power to search for the Time Stone.   


* * *

The building where the trail of the Time Stone led him must have once been elegant. Even now, there was something grand about it beneath the broken glass and the stink of burnt-out seidr.   
  
The sorcerers huddled inside were like children, backed into corners and muttering their cantrips, terror making their voices quaver as the monsters approached.   
  
He couldn't bear to stride in amidst the conquerors, to stand over the mortals like a hound advancing on scared rabbits. The thought made him feel sick to his stomach, so he drew a glamour in place to hide himself from sight before stepping over the threshold.   
  
Finding the stone's guardian was easy. This place was full of curious young things dabbling in the unnecessarily complex yet elegant magic of Midgard. The woman with eyes as old as his own who practically stank of dark magic stood out like a Frost Giant in Asgard.   
  
She stood in the deepest part of the building, in a back room untouched as of yet by the battle raging outside, a last line of defense should all else fail.   
  
He allowed his glamour to drop as he approached. With the amount of power she radiated, it likely wouldn't have fooled her anyway, and as much as he usually enjoyed sneaking, words were his greatest weapon.   
  
She kept her back turned as he entered, and continued watching though the window as the city burned.   
  
"When I was a girl," she said, not flinching away from a sudden swell of crashes and screams as a building in the distance exploded, "my father used to read me stories from around the world, the myths and legends of every people. 'Every good story,' he'd tell me, 'is built on a core of truth, and these are the stories with power enough to endure'."   
  
She did turn to him then, and though the eyes that met his were calm, he still had to resist the urge to flinch away. "The Loki of the myths ends up destroying the worlds in a fit of rage and self-destruction."   
  
"Ragnarok." He swallowed. "I am aware."   
  
"I won't allow the Earth to become one of the worlds you destroy."   
  
His answering grin carried no humor, and it was only the practice of centuries that kept it from becoming a grimace. "It's a little late for that now, don't you think?"   
  
She turned back to the window, the reddish light from the smoke-filled sky making her features seem angular and strange. "Perhaps." Then, "I know why you've come. I won't surrender the Stone. Even if it costs my life I will prevent it from falling into your hands."   
  
"That is not an option," he assured her.   
  
That earned a tiny smile. "You may be surprised."   
  
Odd, how easily he could let that go. Not so long ago, pride would have demanded that he humble her, show her exactly why he was considered one of the most powerful sorcerers in the Nine Realms.   
  
He could have done it, torn through her defenses and ripped the Stone from whatever protections she had put in place, reached into her mind and forced her to deliver it to him herself.   
  
He wasn't sure, then, why he spoke instead. "I intended to fail," he confessed, and felt a shiver of pain through the mental bond that still connected him to Thanos. It was only reflexive, the Titan was otherwise occupied with his conquest, but still, it served as a reminder of who held his leash.   
  
_Blood dripping on asphalt._  He was beyond caring.   
  
"Yet here we are," she said.   
  
"Here we are." He took a deep breath. "I have a proposal."   


* * *

The library was cold and dark, the grey stone nothing like the warm, honey-colored wood and wide windows of the palace library where he'd practically lived growing up. Still, the familiar smell of paper and old leather worked to calm his frayed nerves.   
  
"What you suggest," the sorceress said, "is forbidden magic, and rightfully so."   
  
He laughed, the sound dark and ugly. "Are we to pretend that you've never crossed that line?"   
  
She inclined her head. "Fair enough. But to meddle with the course of time is risky far beyond anything I've done."   
  
"What have you to lose?" he asked viciously, counting it a small victory when the question made her flinch. "Half of your world will be slaughtered without mercy, the other half subjugated to powers that care nothing for any of you. How could you possibly make this any worse for yourself?"   
  
"There is always more to lose." The raw bitterness in her voice made him wonder if there wasn't something to that ridiculous title of hers, a mortal calling themselves the Ancient One for having outlived most in a race of mayflies. It took time and pain to build up that level of pure cynicism. "And why should I believe you care about the fate of the Earth, you its would-be conqueror?"   
  
"I don't," Loki said, not bothering to point out that, for all intents and purposes, he _had_  conquered the Earth. "Thanos killed my brother."   
  
"Even so. Why should I trust you?"   
  
Ah. What a uniquely human thing, to demand he pay tribute in vulnerability, baring his nerves to the open air in order to earn a corresponding measure of trust.   
  
He dropped the mask he wore over his emotions, letting them show on his face, then dove into the place in the back of his mind where he'd locked away all the things he wasn't quite strong enough to endure.   
  
"Trust my rage," he said quietly, allowing her to see his flayed emotions play across his face, flicker in his voice, even though doing so stung like salt in an open wound.   
  
She studied his face, and for one short instant he desperately wished to know what she found there.   
  
After a few seconds, she nodded. In three businesslike strides she was holding a truly ugly golden amulet, and as her hands filled with a vibrant green glow similar to that given off by his own magic, she met his eyes.   
  
"Fail properly this time," she said, and he would swear he saw a spark of mischief in her smile before an overwhelming wave of magic swallowed him, pulling him along like a powerful current dragging a swimmer out to sea until he found himself upright, in a dark room, surrounded not by the green glow of the Time Stone but by the blue of another Stone altogether.   
  
"Sir," a voice called out of the gloom, and he blinked to clear his eyes. "Please put down the spear."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: All the things in the tags that might make people go "uhhh, not sure if I actually want to read that" are worst in this chapter. That isn't to say that other chapters don't also have those things, but this one is probably the most graphic and potentially disturbing, so be aware. As a reminder, there is major character death in this fic, but in the context of a time loop so it doesn't stick. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

The bright light was coming from his own hand, the spear, that dreadful spear they'd thrust upon him before sending him to Earth.    
  
He blinked down at it, trying to process the sudden change in scenery, when several of the mortals with their weapons surged closer.    
  
Instinctively, he took them down, daggers in throats and blood and gurgling death.    
  
_Well that could have gone better_ , an inner voice said. There was nothing for it now, though—like a hive of bees that had already committed to swarm, the rest of the mortals were advancing and attacking.    
  
He took them down because he needed some _space_ , needed to clear his head, but he had the presence of mind to only render the rest of them unconscious. At least, he thought so. Mortals were surprisingly fragile, and he would have to learn to expect that if he were to have further dealings with them.    
  
A clouded surge of pure energy was building behind him, and that's right, he thought he remembered the excess energy from his arrival destroying the facility. He snatched the Tesseract, banished it to a pocket dimension, and teleported away from the facility before the ceiling could come down.    
  
His spell brought him outside, to a place with grass and sunshine. The sky of Midgard shone a pale clear blue, untainted by smoke or clouds or the whir of invading ships. The air didn't smell like oil and fire and death. In the distance, he thought he could hear birds.    
  
He took a deep breath, then looked down at his shaking hands, still wrapped around the spear.    
  
If he was going to do this right, this time, he needed a plan.    
  
An impatient tug in the back of his mind pulled him out of his thoughts. He had a sudden picture of a master pulling the leash of an unwilling dog; the thought made him bristle.    
  
Time to get moving.    
  
Last time he had been counting on Thor (and no, it didn't hurt to think that name, Thor was alive now and had never died) to swoop in and save his precious mortals at the last minute.    
  
When the clouds had started to swirl over the city where his (Thanos') invading army fought with Midgard's defenders, he had allowed himself a small, secret smile.    
  
When Thor himself had hit the ground, trailing lightning and flailing around that enormous hammer of his, he'd counted the battle won.    
  
Too soon. What the Chitauri lacked in strength they made up for in sheer numbers. Still, his brother and the Midgardian heroes had held their own until Thanos and his remaining children had joined the battle.    
  
It was pathetic how quickly their forces had fallen after that.    
  
He couldn't let it get that far, this time. He had to ensure Thor would be here sooner, would join the battle from the beginning so he could win before Thanos made it through the portal.    
  
He carefully peeled back the shroud of magic that hid him from Heimdall's sight and waited.   
  
It didn't take as long, even, as he had imagined, though it was still long enough for his mind to itch from the inactivity. _Planning_ , he thought, _I'm coming up with a plan, I need time_ , because if the Mad Titan couldn't precisely read his thoughts at this distance he could gather impressions, and Loki's inaction could drive him to a very unpleasant form of impatience.    
  
When the grey clouds began to swirl overhead and the prodding at his mind became almost too great to bear, he took himself away, back to the secluded spot he had used to summon his army.   
  
With a thought and a gesture he summoned the Tesseract from its hiding place, holding it firmly between his palms and lowering his forehead until it touched the cool edge of the Stone's casing. Reaching within, he drew on his own magic to create a channel, a stabilizing power that would contain and direct the force of the gem.    
  
Thor would be here any moment. With him here from the outset, the human forces could rally, and the army of Chitauri that started pouring through the freshly opened portal to gather, awaiting instructions (just like last time, but no, this time would be _different_ ), would not prevail.    
  
This time, too, he elected to barely use the scepter and Stone he had been given, so the first wave of the human's defenses met not an army of their own with subsumed wills and glowing blue eyes, but instead the overly-eager first wave of the Chitauri army. A large wave: it took a ridiculously long time for the mortal forces to gather and prepare, and even though he set a slow pace a fair percentage of the Chitauri and their ships were already through and assembled when they finally arrived.    
  
The humans did come eventually though, armies of them with projectile weapons that spat small chunks of metal and siege machines that spat larger, flaming chunks of metal. Creative. He grimaced at the lack of finesse, the homogeneous sea of warriors with their homogeneous weapons.    
  
Still, as before, came the handful of more interesting warriors that Thor had teamed up with last time. The hawk, this time moving and fighting under his own agenda, the captain who fought with a shield as though it alone were a substitute for a proper weapon, the man in the truly clever flying suit of armor. They, at least, were interesting, towering heroes among men even if they were still mortals.    
  
The Chitauri fell in swathes before them, suffering massive casualties that would never have occurred if they had a single scrap of strategy. They died and they died and they died, but still they kept coming, and coming, until suddenly the heroes were falling back instead of pressing forward, crushed under the onslaught of wave after wave of insectoid aliens.    
  
He felt the tide turn in his favor and wanted to be sick.    
  
Thanos himself stepped through the portal not long after, chasing the tail of the Chitauri army. The battle was lost the second his boot touched the Earth, and half a breath later he was blinking up at the compound roof, a too-bright blue glow stinging his eyes.   
  
He dropped the spear and it clattered to the floor, rolling a few inches before rocking and then going still. The only sound was his own ragged breathing and the footsteps of the mortals as they approached, weapons at the ready.    
  
He blinked, and blinked again, because no, this wasn't where he was even a second ago, and the disorienting wave of familiarity left him dizzy.    
  
How was he back here _again_? He'd already ruined his second chance; surely fate would not offer him another.    
  
“Sir?” The human spoke again, less harshly, more insistent. When he didn't answer they pressed in and soon he was restrained, if it could be called that, by barely substantial bonds and weak, fragile warriors that barely deserved the name.    
  
He shook himself when one of them attempted to lead him elsewhere and finally snapped his attention back to the present, shaking off the people and ties alike. The men went flying, which made them angry, if the stream of barely-coherent words was anything to go by. The metal simply snapped.    
  
He started to teleport away and stopped, the magic fading away from his fingertips at the half-formed gesture. The first time he had mismanaged the invasion, badly, and the last time was worse, and yet in both cases he and his borrowed army had won, if not easily, then certainly by a large enough margin to be troubling. Trying the same thing a third time seemed unwise, and though it seemed he had been offered another chance to set things to rights, he dare not count on a fourth.    
  
The hand with its accumulated magic lowered slowly, and if the assembled mortals didn't relax or lower their weapons, then a small amount of the tension went out of the room. Loki  cleared his throat.    
  
“I come to bring a warning,” he said as a high-pitched whine he hadn't even noticed intensified at the edges of his hearing. Right, the energy buildup in the Tesseract from his arrival, preparing to destroy the facility for the third time. Somewhere in the background of his thoughts he could hear the mortals not focused on him babbling in a panic, and he waved a hand, shutting down the feedback loop and dispersing the energy. The babbling reached a new pitch and then fell silent.    
  
“What's this warning,” a man, the same one who  ordered him to put down the spear, spoke. His voice was terse and angry, hostile even, but he was listening. Loki dragged his eyes into focus.    
  
“An invasion,” he rasped out, feeling the the pressure build at the back of his eyes. “He's coming. Thano—”   
  
The sudden stab of pain was blinding, like a dagger through the eye, and he dropped like a puppet with cut strings. His fingers dug into his scalp but he couldn't feel them over the roiling agony that threatened to split his skull, not even when his fingernails drew blood that ran in sticky trails over his face. Vaguely he was aware of the mortals converging on him, trying to hold him still, and their touch only added to the pain, throbbing in time with his heartbeat.    
  
_I will make you long for something as sweet as pain_.    
  
Blood was running down into his eyes, dribbling from his ears, his nose, threatening to choke him. His pulse writhed and twisted through his skull like a living thing, then stuttered once, twice before everything went black.   
  
There was no transition: one second he was on the floor, gasping and bleeding and dying, and the next he was upright and the pain had gone as though it no longer existed. He dragged in a deep sigh of relief over the sound of his pounding heart before—   
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”   
  
He screamed at the man, an alien sound that he could barely reconcile as having come from his own throat, and spirited himself and the Tesseract away.    
  


* * *

  
  
Loki needed time to think.    
  
He found a spot and opened the portal, taking the time it took the Chitauri army to assemble and using it to sit alone with his thoughts. He neither helped nor hindered his own army or the humans who would no doubt fight them: after all, he was fairly certain nothing he did would matter if Thanos won. Once could be coincidence but twice was a pattern, and so far his victorious defeat had led him back to the beginning of some sort of fixed cycle.    
  
If he truly had an endless number of chances, the smart thing to do would be to take as many cycles as he needed to gather information. That meant finding a way to maximize his time to himself per cycle, preferable with as little of Thanos' attention on him as possible. The last cycle made it clear he couldn't warn anyone about Thanos, even the thought of trying again made him shudder, but if he took the time to learn about the players involved, maybe he could come up with a plan where he could engineer his own defeat and then explain once he was finished.    
  
The Chitauri army moved and assembled around him, clanking and chittering like a swarm of oversized bugs. Loki sat and thought as they gathered, as their ships filled the sky and choked out the light from the sun, as a noisy battle erupted and ebbed and flowed and ended.    
  
"Sir, please put down the spear."   
  
He took the cube, spirited it away, grabbed the nearest human who looked like they knew what was going on and pressed the spear to their chest until the Mind Stone squeezed itself between the cracks of their mind. He took them with him when he left, set the army to arriving, and pushed them down into a hastily conjured chair, sitting down across from them with legs crossed.    
  
“Tell me everything you know,” he said tightly, “about the organization you work for.”   
  
Loki sat, and Loki listened, and Loki learned.    
  


* * *

  
  
Careful experimentation showed that he could buy himself some extra time by making his plans unnecessarily foolish and complicated. With a pleading excuse wrapped in well-placed flattery (usually some variant on "oh no, I have not the strength to wield an Infinity Stone. My power, however useful, is certainly no equal to your own"), he could create and maintain the fiction that he required a complex bit of machinery to open the portals, and as Thanos didn't bother to know the extent or details of his abilities, the Titan would accept the delay as necessary. Using the Mind Stone he could compel the humans to build the device without his oversight, giving him more than a day and a half of time per cycle to think and study and learn.    
  
Of course, despite what its name would suggest, using the Mind Stone did nothing for his focus. Too strong a connection, or a link to too many different minds, and the distraction became unbearable. It was a delicate balance. Each new mind he surrendered to the staff's control spread the influence of the Mind Stone a little bit thinner, diverting Thanos' attention and giving him a little bit more breathing space inside his brain. However, the stone linked their consciousness to his own, and the feel of so many other people sharing in his mental space was a distraction all its own.    
  
The ideal, it seemed, was about a half-dozen mortals, not enough to make a loud, frenetic crowd but yet still sufficient to divert a significant amount of the gem's focus.    
  
That gave him a day, maybe a little more, each time before the cycle reset.    
  
Of course, endless days-and-a-half of talking to mortals was liable to drive him insane.    
  
“I couldn't catch him,” Captain America babbled for the dozenth time. Every mortal reacted differently to the imposition of the Stone's presence in their mind. Some, like his Hawk, managed to maintain their good sense with a newfound sense of devotion to carrying out the Tesseract's (or the scepter's, or maybe Thanos' himself, who knew) will. Others, like the man in the iron armor (and to get to him you had to go through his head, not his heart, it was too well-protected—what a perfect metaphor for the man himself,) submitted entirely to the stone's will, or seemed to, hiding most of their deeper mind away from its influence.    
  
But the Captain—he opened like one who had spent too long keeping himself in the too-small shell of a carefully crafted persona. Where he had to find the perfect questions to tease out Stark's answers, Rogers' gave him too much, too easily. His thoughts and feelings and griefs poured out of him like a river pouring through a punctured dam.    
  
Mortals. Exhausting. If he ever escaped this loop it would be centuries before he willingly returned to Midgard.    
  
“And I can't help thinking,” he was saying, “what good are these abilities if I can't even protect the people I care about?”    
  
“Yes,” Loki said. “Very tragic. I'm sure losing your friend Buffy—”   
  
“Bucky.” The Captain almost glared at him, an expression made more unnerving by the glowing blue irises. “His name was Bucky.”   
  
“Fine, Bucky. I know you're very upset about your friend, and this woman you did not dance with, but you were going to tell me about your shield?”   
  
“Yes,” the Captain brightened a little, “right, the shield. Howard made it for me.” His face fell again. “They told me he and his wife died in an accident. If I had been here—”   
  
“Norns, not this again,” Loki said, and cut off the connection. Hearing him talk was bad enough, but an unfortunate side-effect of their connection through the stone was a limited ability to experience the other's thoughts and feelings.    
  
Even the thought sounded unpleasant, but the reality was worse. He had yet to talk to a hero whose head wasn't full of ghosts and regrets and the echoes of past traumas.    
  
The Captain blinked eyes that were abruptly reverted to their own natural shade of blue, then surged to his feet in alarm.    
  
“Where am I? Who are you? What did you _do_  to me?”   
  
His eyes had gone wild, and he looked ready to be sick. Loki pressed two fingers to his forehead and watched impassively as he slumped to the floor of the cave he had dragged them to a few hours ago, unconscious.    
  
He sighed down at Rogers' now-limp form. “I don't know why I bothered,” he muttered. “We've only a minute or so anyways.”   
  
At this point, the information he gathered had long since passed from useful to redundant. He was overdue for another attempt, a _true_  attempt, and as ready as he would likely ever be.    
  
He steeled himself. “Three,” he muttered. “Two, one...”   
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”   
  


* * *

  
  
The attempt did not go better. If anything, it somehow went _worse_. 

The assembled heroes miraculously circumvented Loki's prodding, and not only utterly failed to take down his army, this time they had held their own long enough to _blow up their own city_.    
  
It boggled the mind. Forget weak and inferior, these mortals were the stuff of nightmares. Just intelligent enough to make rope, not enough not to hang themselves.    
  
He came to himself in the bunker with spots from the horrifying explosion still dancing behind his eyes and the ghost of radioactive ash in his lungs, on his skin, the memory so vivid he could feel it still through time and space.    
  
“I give UP!” He shouted without restraint at the mortal who again and again demanded his surrender. “I am done trying to help you stupid, ungrateful lot. It is not worthwhile. You, _none of you_  are worthwhile. I'm finished. I'm through. Find someone else to ride this stupid carousel of horrors.”   
  
For the first time he did as he was asked and dropped the spear. Or, rather, hurled it in a motion that ended up looking far more like a toddler tossing away a toy in the middle of a tantrum than he intended. Same difference.    
  
The man, Fury, (and the cycle where he had probed his mind had. Not. Been. Fun.) did not look appeased by his technical obedience. If anything, the mortals looked more unnerved than before.    
  
He didn't care. He vanished in a flash of green light and reappeared in a Midgardian city. Which one was not important—for his purposes they were nearly all the same.    
  
Perhaps he was going about this wrong. He needed to escape the cycle. Escape.    
  
He paced frantically back and forth, ignoring the tugging at the back of his mind that signaled Thanos' impatience. It was maddening. Like a fly that kept alighting on his skin, itching its little legs across his flesh.   
  
It came again. Tug. Unbearable. Tug. Impossible. He couldn't _do_  this anymore. Not watching Thanos take over the Earth, not trying to reason with these impossible mortals, not tying plans together with bootlaces and hope, not bleeding and burning and dying.    
  
Tug. He drew a long dagger from its hiding place, ignoring the screams of one of the mortals on the street. Tug. He ran a finger along the edge. Escape. He had to escape.    
  
He brought the dagger down and then up, angling it under the ribcage to pierce the heart and lungs. He fell with a gasp, and for a second he thought he had screamed but no, that would be one of the mortals. Someone dropped to his side, but the pain turned his vision white.    
  
Somehow, and for some reason, his traitorous body continued to breathe, his heart beating in pulses of white hot agony. He wondered if Thanos had a way to prevent his death and prolong his suffering from a distance, or if he merely refrained from killing him to give him the slow death he deserved.    
  
This was victory, though, however miserable. Without him to coerce into setting up the portal, Thanos could not come, could not conquer the Earth. He would end, and the cycle would end with him.    
  
He closed his eyes and drifted for a while, trying to hold to the satisfaction through the blinding pain. Winning and coming through alive would have been preferable, but this was a cost he could pay for victory.    
  
Everything had faded to a cool numb static when something _wrong_  twisted in his chest, in the knot under his sternum where his magic resided. The twisting sensation became a tug, like the one at his thoughts earlier only more persistent. Something knotted and loosened and— _no_.    
  
His eyes snapped open again in realization, and his body tried desperately to pull in breath around his shredded lungs. Horror made him grow colder and he gathered what little strength he had to pull back, but it slipped through his fingers like a rope attached to a boulder rolling down the face of a cliff.    
  
His magic. Thanos was using the connection to him to draw on _his magic_  and force the portal open from this side.    
  
It ripped out of him, bursting through his chest in a way that shredded his soul in the same way he'd shredded his own heart with his knife. It _hurt_  in a way he didn't know anything could hurt, made the pain of his physical body fade to near nothing in the background, and he screamed as best he could without the cooperation of his lungs.    
  
Then in a second it was over and he collapsed back into the concrete, wrung-out and bleeding and dying.    
  
A strangled sound came from above him, and it sounded like he felt. He forced his eyes open.    
  
“Loki?” He had never, ever seen Thor look or sound so devastated. Not when he'd let go on the edge of the Bifrost—no, that had been tempered with surprise, numbed by shock and disbelief. Not when they'd fought here on Earth, and he'd faced the full weight of Thor's rage and disappointment.    
  
No, his brother looked like he was the one who'd been gutted. He dropped to his knees, hands hovering uselessly over Loki's shredded chest before carefully wrapping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him close. “Brother, I...” he trailed off, words lost to tears.    
  
Loki blinked. Oh. Of course. The first bit of tenderness he'd gotten from his brother in ages, and he had to be dying for it.    
  
He drifted for a bit, only the sound of Thor's sobbing (an ugly, messy sound—he'd have mocked him for it, if he had the air in his lungs) and warm hands on his shoulders, his chest, his face kept him anchored to this place. Norns, dying was so _slow_. If only this could be over already.    
  
A sharper sound roused him halfway from his daze, and he managed to force his eyes open one last time. The first of the Chitauri ships ground through the sky, followed by screams and the sound of fighting.    
  
All while his useless brother held him and cried instead of joining the fight. Not that Thor could win, he'd learned that one the hard way often enough, but _Thor_  didn't know that.    
  
He gathered up the last bit of his magic, the scraps clinging to his life force and no doubt tethering him here, and pushed them away. At the last second, he realized which spell he wanted to channel them into, and he did.    
  
“Don't worry,” his conjured voice said to his still-crying brother, “next time I'll do it right.”   
  
He didn't hear or see Thor's response, was barely aware as the last of his life drained onto the cold pavement and warm arms.    
  


* * *

  
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”   
  
He ignored him, ignored all of them and stomped up to the nearest agent, a younger man whose weapon shook in his hand. Loki paid no attention to the shouts and the gunfire as he prised the small gun away from him. In the same muttered breath he apologized and spelled the bullet, and with a fluid motion he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.    
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”   
  
He screamed in frustration, long, loud, piercing, enough that the mortals flinched and their fear took on an even more unnerved quality than before.    
  
He couldn't do this. He couldn't _do_  this.    
  
The woman. The sorceress. With a thought he was outside her sanctum, so different now, whole and without the smoke and screams and blood. He threw open the door, stepped through and...    
  
“Please put down the spear.”   
  
Everything within a twenty foot radius shattered as he screamed his frustration again, magic lashing out and crushing machinery, tossing mortals aside like limp dolls. Some sort of failsafe kept him from getting near the Stone, or at least from breaking the loop on any terms other than its own. No exit door, no way out but through.    
  
He couldn't. He couldn't. He _couldn't_.    
  
He wouldn't. He refused to play this game, refused to be a perpetual pawn of the side destined to lose.    
  
His methods gave him a day and a half. A day and a half. If he was giving up, refusing to strain against the bonds of fate that brought Thanos here and dragged the Earth to his feet, what would he do then?    
  
He took a deep, shuddering breath.    
  
Anything. He could do anything, because nothing he did in this cursed loop had any _consequences_.    
  
The thought was almost freeing, and his chest filled with a lightness he hadn't felt since long ago, long before his fall from the Bifrost.    
  
Yes, days and a half. But he wouldn't be spending them planning, or struggling, rolling a rock up a mountain to watch it roll back down.    
  
No, this time, Loki would do what he wanted.    



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I pointed out in an earlier fic that anything long I write tends to involve at least one chapter where the characters...awkwardly yell at each other? The tradition continues. 
> 
> Enjoy!

The mortals called it a "bucket list", he learned. Things they wanted to do in the short time before their tiny lives ended.  
  
It seemed appropriate. Similar, even if they could only die once and he would be back for...he grimaced and didn't finish the thought. If he dwelt on how many times he could, _would_  repeat this cycle he'd go well and truly insane.  
  
It took a little push to set things into motion, the steps now having the easy flow of habit, and he left the mortals to their portal-making and made his way to an open, grassy clearing. He spread his cape over the ground like a blanket and lay on his back, staring up at the cloudless blue sky.  
  
Which became a clouded blue sky rather quickly.  
  
He lay there as the clouds darkened, then as the first tiny raindrops spattered onto his skin. It wasn't until it started to rain in earnest that he stood again and refastened the cloak, chin tilted high, waiting.  
  
It didn't take long. Thor hit the ground in a shock of lightning and stared at him with a curiously mixed expression. He looked hopeful, and wary, and angry, and sad, and he stared as though Loki were a dream, an echo of memory painful to look upon.  
  
“Thor,” he growled, “I have some things to say to you.”  
  
That broke his brother's reverie, and Thor strode forward, traveling entirely too far into his personal space. He'd regret that before long.  
  
“Not now, brother,” Thor said without a hint of self-doubt. “Retrieve the Tesseract from wherever you have stowed it. We are going home.”  
  
“And what makes you think,” he spat, taking a step back, “that I _ever_  want to return to a place that brought me nothing but grief?”  
  
It wasn't even a lie, not really. He didn't miss Asgard. He missed being safely out of the Titan's hands. He missed his bed and having time to rest, and his books, the grand library and even his mother, liar though she may be. He missed the moments when Thor had treated him with regard and affection, the sparse times he'd managed to impress his father. He missed the safety and the warmth and standing in the sun.  
  
He could miss those things without missing Asgard, or truly wanting to go back. They weren't the same.  
  
“That isn't true,” Thor said crossly. “Loki, you—”  
  
“So now you deign to tell me what  _I_  think, what _I_ feel, is that it? This is exactly the problem. You, none of you ever _listen_.”  
  
Thor's jaw set, but to Loki's surprise he didn't yell over the top of him again. “Very well,” Thor said, “I'm listening now.”  
  
He considered parrying with another verbal jab, _you're too late, brother, far too late for that—_ but what purpose would that serve? Here, in a place where Thor would remember not a word of this in a few hours, he had no reason to hide, to lie.  
  
“You don't respect me,” he said at last, meeting Thor's eyes like a challenge.  
  
“That's not—”  
  
“I should have known your vow to listen wouldn't last past a single sentence,” he snarled, and Thor's mouth clicked shut. He glared mutinously, but didn't threaten violence, and Loki left the spell in place. Let him see what it felt like to be silenced, to have his thoughts go unheard and unregarded. “No, don't lie. Don't play as though this is all a trick of my mind, or something you can will away now that I'm inconveniencing you.”  
  
He drew in a deep breath, suppressing the tears that came to his eyes then remembering that there was _no reason to_. “You surrounded yourself with friends who mocked me and said nothing against their insults. You downplayed and belittled my interests, my skills and my accomplishments at every turn. You never listened to me, never took my advice, never even considered—”  
  
“The last time I took your advice,” Thor said, and Loki's concentration must have slipped to allow him to speak again, “I wound up on Jotunheim, and was banished soon after.”  
  
“And how did I convince you to go?” he almost screamed. “By telling you _not_  to, because I knew whatever I suggested you would do the _exact opposite_! And I didn't see you following my advice when I said we should leave peacefully. You can blame me all you want, but I never talked you into a cursed thing you didn't already want to do in the first place.”  
  
He took a step closer. “And that's not the worst of it,” he said in a low, dark voice. “The worst thing is that it was never just you. I don't think you ever realized how much you were loved and emulated, how much Asgard did as you did, but every man, woman and child would follow your example when deciding how to treat me. Then you left, off to gallivant with your mortals, and I was king, and alone, and as if that wouldn't have been hard enough already not a soul would listen to me. Your friends, people I've spent most of my life with, betrayed me at their earliest convenience. I was rightfully crowned and Heimdall himself defied me, and the second I relieved him of his duties for disobedience he attempted to strike off my head.”  
  
Thor looked a little green at that. It seemed Heimdall hadn't volunteered that particular part of the story. Little surprise that.  
  
“You must know most of this already,” he said. “So tell me, how were these acts of treason punished? Allow me a guess. They weren't.” He took a deep breath. “I was king, unexpectedly, in a time of deep unrest, and do you know what I realized? Apart from my own mother, whom I had just learned was not my mother and had lied to me all my life, there was not a single soul I could turn to or trust. When you left you left me well and truly alone. The people I should have been able to rely on were the first to betray me. And yet I'm guessing you consider them no less your friends than before.”  
  
He took in Thor's expression and snorted. “I thought so, and that is but the last in a long line of grievances. So don't you _dare_ ,” he said, “try to pretend that you respect me, or support me, or hold me in any true regard. Are you still surprised that I have no wish to return to your home?”  
  
Thor looked... hunted. Like a man who thought himself at a party and suddenly found himself beset on all sides by assailants he thought were friends.  
  
It was the same expression, he realized suddenly, that his brother had made all those years ago, after the now-infamous prank where Thor had picked up a snake and it turned out to be Loki with a knife, waiting to stab him. Back then it had been funny. It wasn't funny anymore.  
  
Loki had expected to feel catharsis, to be lighter with the weight of his grievances unloaded, but that wasn't what he felt. Letting the poison he bottled up inside spill over did nothing to ease the damage it burnt into his chest; if anything, his venting was like the bellows that stoked a flame. It burned him then settled heavily in his chest, like the weight of his own anger was just another burden for him to carry.  
  
Tomorrow, Thor would remember none of this. At the moment, Loki couldn't remember why he thought this would be a good idea.  
  
A metallic screech filled the sky, and both brothers snapped their attention upwards as one of the Chitauri warships careened past them.  
  
Thor growled. “What is this? If this was a distraction, Loki, to keep me here while your schemes unfurled, I—”  
  
Loki tuned him out. He would be gone soon anyway, and Loki could hardly wait for this emotionally draining cycle to be over.  
  
Tomorrow, he would have to do something distracting, something fun, and hope it would banish the ache still burning in his chest like the hollow space after a long, unproductive cry.  
  
Thor grabbed the front of his shirt and lifted him up threateningly, but it didn't matter, because any second—  
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”  
  
Loki laughed, the sound hollow in his own ears. “I have a list of demands,” he said, and Fury's expression hardened further, if such a thing was possible.  
  
“You are surrounded by armed men in a secured facility,” Fury said, and Loki snorted. “The way I see it, you are in no position to be making demands.”  
  
“You're right,” he said, “apologies. I'm a bit ahead of myself.”  
  
He grabbed the Tesseract and the handful of assorted mortals that allowed the set-up to run most smoothly, disappeared for just long enough to set things in motion, then was back in the bunker.  
  
“You! Drop the weapon, on your knees!” Loki did neither, only arched an eyebrow and called their bluff. “Return the Tesseract and our men,” Fury growled, and there were a fair number of guns pointed in his face. He waved a hand and melted them to slag, barely suppressing a smirk at the speed with which the men dropped the hot metal before it disintegrated and the open shock on their faces.  
  
“As I said. ” He met Fury's single, furious eye. “I have demands.”  
  
“And what might those be,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm.  
  
Loki did grin, then. “Bring me Tony Stark.”

* * *

  
  
It took a surprisingly long time, given how much the mortals had to lose by denying him, and when at last Stark appeared, flanked by the agency's heavily armed guards, his first words were “I'm not building you a weapon.”  
  
He allowed a wide, chilling grin to spread across his face. “I wouldn't dream of asking it.”  
  
“Really.” The single word rang with open skepticism. “These guys tell me I'm the only one you'll deal with. Somehow I doubt you requested me for my charming personality.”  
  
“To the contrary.” He felt a brief jolt of amusement, and let it show in his expression. “I wish to experience the entertainment this planet has to offer, and I'm told you are somewhat of an expert.”  
  
The man's eyebrows shot up as though they were trying to become acquainted with his hairline. “What?” He turned to Fury. “Are you telling me that you brought me here because what, an invading alien wants a drinking buddy?”  
  
“Norns, no.” At least not this time. “I was thinking something more... low-key. Perhaps a play, or the digital equivalent you all seem so fond of.”  
  
“You want to watch a movie. He wants to watch a movie,” he muttered, starting to look very much like someone who had doubts about their own sanity.  
  
“Let's say we allowed this,” Fury cut in. “You'd return the Tesseract and our men, just like that?”  
  
Loki grinned. “Do this and I swear to you, the Tesseract and your agents will be back in place tomorrow, completely unharmed. It will be as though nothing at all has happened.”  
  
“Forgive me if I don't take you word for it. _If_  we agree to this, and that's a pretty big if, we'd need the Tesseract and our agents back first. Then we could talk.”  
  
He shrugged. “Then I shall find my entertainment elsewhere, and keep what I have. Perhaps trade it to someone more...accommodating.”  
  
“I'll do it,” Stark said, and if there was fear in his voice, there was also curiosity, and that was something Loki could respect.  
  
“I'm not authorizing—”  
  
“He doesn't need your permission, and neither do I.” Loki took Stark's arm, and the mortal barely flinched. “I do what I want.”  
  
With a wrench and a tug of magic they were blinking in the sunlight of the streets above, in the midst of the city Stark called home.  
  
“Huh,” he said, looking just a bit shaken. “That's a neat trick. I bet you save tons on gas. That is, if whatever planet you're from uses gas. Because you're an alien. I'm talking to an alien.”  
  
“We don't,” Loki said.  
  
“Right, right. Of course not. You're from an advanced planet, you're probably light-years ahead of us when it comes to—”  
  
“We ride horses.” Stark gave him another look, somewhere between shocked and personally affronted. “Sometimes very large wolves. I tried to ride a dragon once, but the dragon didn't appreciate it.”  
  
“Huh,” he said again, looking faint. “So, movie. Did you have one in mind, or...?”  
  
“I was rather hoping you could suggest one,” Loki said mildly.”  
  
“Right, okay. Star Wars is a classic, of course, but there are a lot of them. Same with Harry Potter, which that whole teleporting thing tells me you might enjoy. Disney movies are meant for kids, but they're fantastic. There's the Matrix, Indiana Jones, Terminator—what sort of things do you like?”  
  
Loki hummed. “How about the first one?” After, all, there would be time enough to watch the others later.  
  
All told, he had nothing but time.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday, and thanks for reading!

“Brother,” Thor called, “you must change back, and come down _now_.”   
  
Loki hissed, latching on tighter to the edges of the stonework until they began to crumble.    
  
A helicopter buzzed past his head and he twisted around to snap at it, catching just the very end of the tail in his jaws. The little machine veered off course and spiraled away, leaving an unpleasant grinding sound and a trail of smoke in its wake. His tail thrashed in agitation, crumbling more of the building and leaving powder and chunks of stone to rain down on the streets below.    
  
It struck him that the edges of the building would do a very nice crunching if he chewed on them, so he did. The sound was reminiscent of a five ton cat eating kibble and served to unnerve the mortals greatly, if the way they ran around at increased speeds down on the ground was any indication.    
  
“Loki,” Thor said, his voice closer now. Loki swung his head around irritably to where his brother perched on the edges of the stonework, because yes, right, Thor could fly. “You need to stop this.”   
  
A halfhearted nip at his brother's feet sent him dancing back and nearly unbalancing on the edge. He huffed a breath that sent twin trails of smoke into the sky.    
  
“You used to warn me,” Thor tried again, “that spending too long in another form could lead to losing oneself. You will become the beast you imitate if you do not stop this now.”   
  
Loki laughed, incidentally setting several things on fire and melting a chunk of the stone wall to slag, then spread his wings, fanning them out and shifting to balance as he clung to the building.    
  
“Don't do it,” Thor said, sounding more alarmed than he had previously.    
  
He gave the wings a small, experimental flutter, whipping up a wind fit to rival the beginning of one of his brother's storms.    
  
“Loki, don't,” Thor shouted through the wind, too late.    
  
With a magnificent flap of his wings and a sound like a mile-wide canvas flag booming in the wind, he pushed off, rising slowly and ponderously over the city. The wind from his ascent sent Thor tumbling down towards the earth and he laughed at that too, a scraping and purring sound that had stopped feeling alien almost an hour ago. Now it felt right. _He_  felt right.    
  
Nearly an hour remained until the cycle ended, and it was easy enough to avoid the mortals' projectiles as he bobbed and twisted and glided through the air, reveling in the freedom to be found within the bars of his temporal cage.    
  


* * *

  
  
Watching the mortals fall over didn't get old. If anything, it grew funnier as the day wore on, especially compared to how easily he could glide over the icy streets, a skill perfected in the frozen ponds of Vanaheim when he and Thor were children playing in the snow.    
  
“Stop!” Came the growled order from behind him, and he turned reluctantly. He nearly gave in to the temptation to slide away again, but the humans scrabbling along on spiked boots and the dubious traction they provided had proven remarkably tenacious despite how slowly they moved.    
  
“Stop what, exactly?” He turned to face them, raising his hands and smiling indulgently. The overblown winter gear made the mortals look rather like waddling penguins. Even under all those layers they shivered, each breath painting the air in streaks and puffs of white. “I am not doing anything of note currently, merely enjoying the ice.” To demonstrate, he gave a little twirl, barely keeping himself from laughing at the way they clutched their weapons tighter.    
  
“I don't know if you noticed, but we aren't really enjoying it,” the deceptively bland one, Coulson, said dryly. The stories he'd told while under the influence of the Mind Stone strained belief, and Loki'd eventually given up on finding the right questions to ask to give them context. He may have been a mortal, and not a particularly strong one, but Loki still found him a tiny bit unnerving.    
  
“Maybe a warm beverage?” he suggested, infusing the words with an irritating level of bubbly cheer that was surprisingly easy to fake. Hot weather always left him feeling slow, sluggish and miserable, and now he found the cold did the opposite. Here in this frozen city, the air filled him with energy, brisk and bracing and right. Part of him so desperately wanted to fly down the streets on the slick coating of ice, quick as thought, until he could hear nothing but the wind created by his own movement, feel nothing but the bracing chill.    
  
“Maybe you undo whatever it was you did with that cube,” Coulson returned humorlessly.    
  
“What,” he said, “I'm given to understand this planet was overheating. Really, you should thank me.”   
  
“Don't get me wrong, I'm as concerned about global warming as the next guy, but the ice age is a bit overkill.” He suppressed another grin because Stark was here, and he was, if not helpful, then at least interesting. Unpredictable. That was something to be valued in a world of repetition. “Hey, are you listening, or—”   
  
He did grin, then, at a flash of color at the edge of the crowd of soldiers. Rogers, then, the unwilling peacock among crows. Just the man he hoped to see. He'd something he wanted to try.    
  
In a single fluid motion, he ducked beneath the front line of guns, snatched the man's shield, laid it flat on the ground, sat and gave a push with his legs. The friction between the shield and the ice—it practically didn't exist, and he and his makeshift sled shot off at a truly impressive pace. Honestly, he doubted even Sleipnir could have kept up.    
  
He waved to the mortals as they disappeared into panicking little specks, then dragged his boots until they ground to a halt. He stood, caught the edge of the shield with his foot to flip it up into his hand, and set off to find the tallest hill in all of frozen New York.    


* * *

  
  
He found what he wanted on a fruit stand at the edge of a road, and he didn't bother walking out of the seller's line of sight before teleporting to a small, secluded grassy knoll where the wind sent slow waves rolling through the grass. The sun shone just enough to warm the earth and he sat with his back to a shaded cliff, surveying his spoils.   
  
He picked up the first berry by the stem, rolling it through his fingers slowly and enjoying the smell. The first bite was slow, almost lazy, and he savored it.    
  
It consumed his attention to the point where he didn't notice Thor until he looked up and the other was there, opposite him with something near horror on his face. Thor stood frozen for an instant before he lunged forward and sent the berries tumbling.    
  
“What are you _doing_?” His voice was half-choked with frantic panic. Loki regarded him impassively, the sweetness of the fruit still heavy on his tongue.    
  
“I'm eating strawberries,” he said simply. “I've always wanted to. The smell is heavenly.”    
  
“You are _allergic_  to strawberries,” Thor shouted, as though he didn't know. As though the deep red, ripe berries weren't one more thing he envied, one more pleasure denied him simply for the crime of being Loki. He ran his tongue over his lips, aware of the way it had already begun to swell.    
  
“I know what I'm doing,” he said, though the words did come out slightly muffled, slightly slurred.    
  
Suddenly he was staring up at the sky, and Thor was holding him up. “The Tesseract,” Thor was saying, no, begging. “If you just tell me where it is we can get you back to the healers. You'll be fine, just tell me, please tell me.”   
  
He opened his mouth, but the only thing that would come out was a soft choked sound. There was no air, he couldn't breathe, but after the void a little thing like that hardly bothered him.    
  
Thor took one of his hands, squeezing the limp blue fingers (nearly back to their true color, even if it was from lack of oxygen) and sobbing out words like no, hold on, please don't. They all ran together, blurry and languid, until...    
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”   
  


* * *

  
  
He must have spent a month's worth of days just competing with himself to see how large he could possibly grow this one snail he found, predictably, every day, on the underside of a leaf on a bush in the corner of the park.    
  
It was soothing, almost, working out the minute adjustments and solving the engineering hurdles of preventing the creature from collapsing from its own weight. For some reason, the vague thoughts of 'havoc' and 'panic' and 'plan' seemed enough to satisfy Thanos for a while; either the Mad Titan wasn't paying particularly close attention or he truly believed that Loki's first and best plan involved a snail of epic proportions.    
  
A snail. Barely more than a bit of slime in a shell. One human name for it meant stomach with a foot, which amused him more than it probably should. It was a laughable creature for any to use, or to fear, let alone a prince of Asgard.    
  
Still, though Thor had ostensibly progressed past his childhood aversion, Loki didn't miss the way he blanched the first time a snail the size of a small dog scooted between them when he came to try and reclaim the Tesseract.    
  
Or the second.    
  
Or the third, by which time it was the size of a truly large dog indeed.    
  
One of the few benefits to this thankless, awful, predictably doomed cycle was that his brother never grew desensitized to his new tricks. So rather than gradually losing his reaction, his brother simply went more and more tense and wrong-footed the bigger the thing got, and it was almost worth the rest to see the look on his face.    
  
When it grew to be the size of a large truck, the first sight of it rendered Thor speechless. The shade of green that tinted his complexion wasn't entirely healthy.    
  
“Why, Loki?” It was the first time his brother's first words to him were not about the theft of the Tesseract or Thor's own misplaced grief. Apparently, a large enough snail provided a distraction from nearly anything.    
  
“Because I can,” he said lightly, and didn’t think too hard on what he meant by that. Didn't imagine a life where he did crazier and crazier things to keep the dullness, the monotony, the predictability of this one cursed day from driving him mad.    
  
Things like replacing the sky full of clouds with magical constructs that rained glitter, then railing Thor up until he caused a storm.    
  
(The result was magnificent; he would have to remember it for when he escaped this wretched loop, and Thor could remember it with him.)   
  
Things like choreographing an elaborate elven dance routine to some ridiculous bit of Midgardian music, then performing it with his doubles suddenly in the middle of a startled crowd.    
  
(At least he hadn't run out of new music yet. Midgardian musicians were terrible by and large, their work either too chaotic or overly simplistic, but the music had heart and they were _prolific_.)   
  
Things like showing his brother his Jotunn form just to see how he would react.    
  
(Thor flinched back in disgust before steeling himself and insisting that no, it didn't matter to him. Loki knew better than to trust words over actions. He never showed Thor again, not after that.)   
  
When Thor scolded him for ludicrous crimes like replacing mortal monuments with statues of himself, when his companions found themselves forced to climb greased stairs to catch him, when he watched a new movie with Stark or slithered through the streets as a giant snake, he could almost forget the monotony of living through the same day again and again, of a world where nothing besides him could grow or change.    
  
Almost.    


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I've run into this often enough that I'm just gonna ask: is there an etiquette for "this doesn't have a sequel now but there's a decent chance it might in the nebulous future (because I have no self-control)"? How do people deal with this? What do you all prefer? Make a series that might sit forever with one lonely fic in it? Just "it happens if it happens" and hope anyone who wants to read it stumbles on it by happenstance? Other options? Thoughts?


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much everyone for patiently answering my series question on the last chapter! I appreciate the advice, and I hope you guys enjoy the conclusion!

Loki lost count of the days, and lost track of everything else. Cycles spun together in endless monotony, always with one of two endings. Either Thanos conquered Midgard and everything reset, or he died and, presumably, Thanos conquered Midgard and everything reset.  
  
Nothing changed except in response to his own actions. No _one_  changed.  
  
None of the people felt real anymore. They were like clever simulacra, responding in programmed ways to stimuli with a limited number of responses, hollow ghosts of themselves. Nothing mattered to them for long, no emotions or grudges or even injuries surviving past the inevitable relapse to the beginning of the cycle. Everything washed away with each new iteration like words drawn in the sand smoothed over with the tide.  
  
Even tormenting Thor had grown to be less of a diversion, and at this point when he baited or accused or stabbed at his brother it was purely out of habit. Habit, well, and possibly frustration at his brother for becoming this two-dimensional version of himself whose reactions were predictable and boring. It wasn't Thor's fault, and he knew that, but he couldn't help but blame him. Besides, Thor wouldn't remember anything he did, so there was no logical reason to spare a thought for his feelings.  
  
His brother's mortal shield-brothers held up no better. Sometimes he wanted to kill them for the itch they set in his brain, the repetition and sameness that stifled him now whenever a cycle fell into predictable tracks. Several times, he did. He stopped when they even died predictably. There was no novelty, nothing redeeming in senseless death. No—that, too, was a constant, the reality of Thanos' slaughter a relentless background to his exploits.  
  
Always, they lost. The Captain, barely more than a child even among his own people and bearing up beneath the weight of a tailor-made reputation. Stark with his quick tongue and a wit turned to mockery of itself through unintentional repetition. The spies, Widow and Hawk, shield-companions with their loyalty given to each other as much as their leaders. Even Thor, his perfect, unbeatable brother, the one he would have sworn could not lose, fell time and time again before Thanos.  
  
For a time he would have taken an oath that nothing in all the realm of Midgard could surprise him, that all its secrets, such as they were, had been surrendered to him long ago.  
  
He discovered he was wrong almost by accident.  
  
Really, he blamed Tony Stark for what he had been doing. Him and his monster movies. After all, Godzilla and King Kong and whatever other enormous creature made stomping through the streets look like _fun_ , and this game of cycles had long since stolen away his sense of dignity in favor of seeking gratification. It was a small step from his snail-growing experiments to self-growing experiments, and it turned out that knocking over buildings while making dinosaur noises was _exactly_  as much fun as it looked.  
  
That was before the mortal flying machine, the one they used as base while they hunted the Tesseract, showed up. He'd crashed it before, of course. Often. Creatively. But always far from him, because dying crushed under the rubble of a crashed airship didn't appeal.  
  
Now, though, he surrendered to the overwhelming temptation to swat it out of the sky with a giant hand. Or hands, after all, it was still fairly larger than him, but he had the strength and leverage to send it limping to the ground.  
  
To his surprise, then, a little green man popped out of the rubble, roaring angrily.  
  
Well, not little, at least not objectively, though Loki was considerably larger at the time being. He peered down at the little giant as it roared again, then, before he could react, turned and pushed off a building to launch himself at Loki's head.  
  
He lost his balance as the man-beast struck, wavering dangerously before falling over. The laws of physics took over at that point, and he must have hit his head hard, because the glow of the Space Stone replaced the tumbling city skyline.  
  
“Sir, please put down the spear.”  
  
He shook off the grogginess long enough to take the Tesseract and capture his mortals, then found his favorite thinking-roof and dangled his feet off the edge, losing himself in thought.  
  
Why had he never seen the green beast before? Clearly, such power would be helpful in standing against his armies, and though he doubted the beast could turn the tide of the battle where Thor could not, that didn't explain why it had never been tried.  
  
Nonetheless, he knew that, at some point and in some realities, the green beast would be in the mortal's flying machine. Finding out more should be easy enough.  
  
With little more than a thought he teleported on board, and a simple spell he'd been using since childhood rendered him invisible to mortal eyes. Ignoring the mortals he knew and the boring ones, he made his way through the ship, pausing only long enough to steal a permanent marker and leave a crude drawing on Captain America's shield. Force of habit.  
  
Near the center of the craft he came across a reinforced cage, and for an instant he thought that surely he had found what he was looking for, but unless the green beast was also invisible, the cage was empty. He phased through the wall and poked around to be sure, but found nothing. Frustrating.  
  
Rather than attempt to come up with a plan, he resolved to do as he had been doing and throw himself at the problem from several angles. It was like throwing the bones until they promised good luck, but thus far careful planning had gotten him nowhere and he had the time to waste.  
  
The next time he boarded the airship, he had a small army in tow and seized control of the craft. The takeover went smoothly, and a careful search of the vessel unearthed no green beast.  
  
The time after that he surrendered himself, after a fashion, and boarded as a negotiator, though more enemy general than diplomat. Again, no green beast. He began to wonder if the cycles had begun to drive him mad, if he had started conjuring things from his own imagination as boredom overwhelmed him.  
  
The next attempt required a bit more forethought. If he wished to be captured and put in the cage directly, he must seem a threat, but not so dire a threat that heavier measures would be taken. They could rarely kill him, but it was unpleasant whenever they managed, and even after all this time what was left of his pride didn't care for it.  
  
This time, when he snatched the Tesseract he did so more dramatically than usual, and he left a couple of casualties, enough to make SHIELD angry but not so many as to terrify them. There was a step in the Usual Plan where his small team of mortals stole a fancy metal for the stalling portal-building device, and this time he took charge of that mission personally. After all, he may as well do something if he was to be arrested.  
  
The mortals outside the building where the metal was being kept were having a party, and he strode past them, taking a small vindictive pleasure at the way they yelped and moved aside. He pushed his way through, looking for a specific mortal he needed to open the door until something at one of the far tables caught his eye.  
  
He stopped stock-still, not moving, hardly breathing. For a second he thought that surely his eyes must be deceiving him, but when he stepped closer it became clear that it was real.  
  
A small three-tiered fountain sat at the center of the table with foodstuffs arranged artfully around it, and running through the fountain, in place of the water he would have expected, flowed pure, silky melted chocolate.  
  
He mentally weighed the effort of repeating everything he'd done so far in this cycle against his own desires and decided he'd earned a break, and besides, he'd spent countless cycles doing far worse. A tray of mixed cut fruit sat on the table; he pushed it aside and climbed up, sitting down with his legs crossed and pulling the entire tiny fountain into his lap. The crowd, wary and confused, made no move to stop him.  
  
When the heroes of Earth found him a few moments later, he barely glanced up before returning to his dedicated goal of dipping every edible object on the table in chocolate. Despite his best efforts it coated his fingers and streaked across his face; no doubt he looked like a small child.  
  
The small group slowed to a cautious halt before approaching, movements gone even more tense and wary than before.  
  
“Somebody please tell me what I'm looking at,” Stark said. “Because no way is the evil villain we were sent here to stop cuddling up to a chocolate fountain.”  
  
“Sir,” Rogers said, trying his best to infuse some formality into the situation and doing a decent job, all things considered, given that he was talking to an alien invader with an entire cookie stuffed in his mouth and a chunk of pineapple carefully coated in melted chocolate in each hand. “You're going to have to come with us.”  
  
Loki glanced up and then dropped the fruit. Without breaking eye contact, he slowly and deliberately picked up a marshmallow, dipped it in the fountain, and stuck it to Rogers' face.  
  
The Captain looked so indignant Loki very nearly lost his composure. Stark did. Rogers glared at his ally, who was clutching his stomach and laughing uncontrollably, and opened his mouth to speak when the crack of thunder split the sky.  
  
It started to rain, wet and sloppy with little gusts of wind, and Loki yelped, pulling his cape over his head and fanning it out to create an awning for himself and his chocolate.  
  
With one more ominous crack of lightning and its accompanying bass roll of thunder, Thor stood beside him, standing tall and menacing and outlined by clouds.  
  
Thor eyed him for a second or two with an expression best described as unimpressed, possibly because of his chocolate-streaked face and mouthful of marshmallows.  
  
“Enough of your games, brother,” Thor said with admirable seriousness, all things considered.  
  
He didn't answer. Instead, he pulled the chocolate fountain close and stood up to his full height on the somewhat unstable table, drawing himself up until he could look down at the little company, and made deliberate eye contact before upending the entire contents of the fountain on top of his brother's head.  
  
Thor huffed, and Loki relished the expression of indignant rage that flashed through his eyes before he spirited himself away to wait for the next cycle.

* * *

  
  
The next time he reached the party, he ignored the fountain, reminding himself that stopping every time meant sacrificing the possibility of progress. He had to hold to that, to believe in at least the distant possibility, to keep from going fully mad.  
  
Once he had the material he found a platform and addressed the nearby mortals, speaking with half his mind fixed on planning, planning, always planning. His speech drew from the ideologies preached in Thanos' sanctuary but also things he knew from interrogating the Captain and the spies, things the mortals would fear.  
  
He drew the speech out long and kept the fight short, because losing was the shortest route to where he wanted to go.

* * *

  
  
Thor showed up sooner rather than later, because he wouldn't be Thor if his timing wasn't maximally inconvenient. This time, though, as the mortals were Loki's captors rather than comrades on the same quest to capture him, they fought with Thor instead of helping him. Even if this experiment otherwise bore no fruit, he thought it might be worthwhile just for the opportunity to watch. The mortals, impressively, held their own. Thor roared in frustration and Loki nearly laughed.

* * *

  
  
The Widow brought the beast up almost on her own, with only the subtlest of prompting on his part. Were he truly interested in winning this fight, she would undoubtedly be one of the first humans he would have recruited, her with her mind as sharp as her knives.  
  
She confirmed that, in this cycle at least, the beast was somewhere on board, though clearly not in its cage. Perhaps they had released it upon deciding he was the greater threat. In a way, it was almost flattering.  
  
His small strike team, engineered to see if the beast would defend the ship, drew proof beyond that verbal confirmation that the beast was on board. He wasted too long dropping Thor out of the ship (he would be fine, not that it mattered, he could fly after all) to see more of the chaos than the destruction the beast had already caused, but that was no matter. He could always see it next time.

* * *

He fought alongside Thanos' army, though he'd rarely done so before and didn't care to, for the opportunity to see this new opponent in action. Because he was here, now, joining the battle even though he never had before. Perhaps because of the incident in the flying deathtrap, perhaps because Loki moved the site of the invasion closer to where he thought the beast might have fallen, but he was here, and Loki kept half an eye on him even as he fought alongside Thanos' ragtag army.  
  
Getting any closer to the beast seemed nearly impossible, though, because Thor seemed determined to take Loki down himself. Perhaps in a future loop he could somehow get himself captured without alerting Thor to his presence on this realm? But Thor cornered him, and Thor fought him, and Thor looked at him with those too-disappointed eyes he was tired of seeing.  
  
“It's not too late to end this,” he said, almost gently, and it could have distracted him, might have except that he had heard it before, those exact words in that tone, and suddenly he was angry beyond belief that Thor was this shallow, unchanging, pre-programmed version of himself. He needed a reaction, something different than every time this has happened before, so without thinking he drove a dagger into his brother's stomach. Not deep enough to kill—he had seen Thor's death enough times, and it was another thing he'd rather not relive. Enough, though, to get a spark, a reaction, because even if it was directed at him Thor's anger felt more real than the disappointment and nostalgic tenderness this Thor too often cycled between.  
  
His brother growled, and Loki grinned.

* * *

  
  
Coming face-to-face with the beast was, once again, an unplanned accident.  
  
He didn't think of it as luck. After having lived this day as many times as he had, anything that happened, good or bad, was nothing more than a statistical inevitability.  
  
Nonetheless, he stood facing him atop the tower, still a little disoriented from his recent flight and the ringing in his ears from the Hawk's exploding arrow.  
  
He almost slipped away, but what better way to test the beast's strength than directly? It could hurt, but what was pain to him now, after everything else this cycle had put him through? No, pain only served as a reminder that he lived, that he was real even if nothing else was.  
  
So he yelled the first insults that came to mind, not bothering with cleverness or even whether they made sense, and when the creature grabbed hold of his heel he went limp and focused his mind on taking stock of how much damage, precisely, the beast could inflict.  
  
Something gave way at the back of his skull with a tearing sensation. _Oh_ , he thought, this would be another of the cycles where he died, and there were rather a lot of those now.  
  
The beast slammed him into the floor and left him, but while the world kept spinning lazily and his head ached, it didn't _feel_  like he was dying. Almost by instinct he ran a diagnostic pulse of magic through his skull, and—  
  
It was gone.  
  
He checked again and again to be sure, his magic clawing at the spot where it had been like hands at a once-gaping wound that now was only smooth flesh, but Thanos' spell, his hold on him, was _gone_.  
  
He lay in the crater, giddy with relief, reveling in a mind that was wholly his own once more. This—this changed everything. All he had to do, now, was wait to be swept up once more, to hear an angry voice demanding he put down that thrice-cursed spear, and he could do everything right, get someone (and did it have to be the green beast? Perhaps he could find a way to do it himself) to shake Thanos' hold free, and he could walk away with this future safely averted and none the wiser.  
  
The sweep of magic never came.  
  
Instead, he lay there breathing until Thor and his mortal friends returned, visibly weary and slightly battered but alive and well and, apparently, triumphant.  
  
His first reaction was panic, because this wasn't supposed to end like _this_ , on an attempt where almost everything had gone wrong and he, Loki, was a villain who had killed so _many_  of the helpless little mortals that thinking about it made him feel sick.  
  
Not even that, though, could stop the naked relief from welling up inside him. It was finally, _finally_  over. He had lost count of how many tries it had taken, but Thanos had been stopped, and if Thor was angry and hurt at least he was alive.  
  
A small smile twitched his lips, despite his best efforts to hold it back. He sat up, and the bruises on his ribs didn't quite outweigh the weight that had been lifted from his shoulders. "I think," he said, taking a deep breath because he _could_ , "I'll have that drink now."

* * *

Maybe if he wasn't so exhausted and _done_ , Loki would have tried to wrangle the truth into something that he could present to the Allfather.  
  
Maybe, if he hadn't built a reputation for himself as such a tremendous liar, Odin might have believed him.  
  
As it was, he saw no point in it. Let them believe what they would. Even if the whole truth were presented and believed, he'd hardly be the hero of the tale, a broken pawn trying desperately to undo more damage than he'd unleashed. The best he could hope for was pity, and no, he would not fight for that.  
  
He was in a cell and out again, dying on Svartalfheim  and impersonating the Allfather, socializing on Sakaar and fighting Hela, and somehow it all led back to Thanos, to his throat in the monster's enormous fist while he clawed and scrabbled and died.  
  
There was a _snap_ , and everything went dark, and when it swam back into focus he was underground, in a bunker lit with a harsh blue glow, clutching at something that felt at once hateful and familiar.  
  
"Sir," came a too-familiar voice, "please put down the spear."  
  
A large part of him thought _no, not this again, I thought I was finally done_.  
  
But he knew so much now that he hadn't before. This was before, before so many things, before Asgard was destroyed or he established himself as a villain on Midgard, before Frigga—and there was still so much he could change.  
  
He picked up the spear, straightened his shoulders, and grinned. Maybe this time, he could do it _right_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm still not sure whether or when an actual sequel will happen, but the awesome Noideasfornames suggested a sort of deleted-scenes snippet with Loki and Tony's movie-watching. I accidentally started that, and it should be finished within a reasonable amount of time, so a series we have! It's probably significantly less fluffy than they were imagining, but well. 
> 
> Thank you again to everyone who read, and left kudos, and commented! I love hearing from you guys, and the support for this fic has been awesome!
> 
> If you're anything like me and want more time loop fics, here are a couple of my favorites:
> 
> [those yesterdays bleeding through](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044639) by [wnnbdarklord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wnnbdarklord/pseuds/wnnbdarklord)
> 
> This is one of my favorite all time fics, you guys. I found it forever ago (and apparently haven't reviewed it yet? How did I miss doing that?) Basically, it has Loki caught in a time loop during the events of The Dark World, trying to save Frigga. I won't give away the ending, but it is in turns dark, unsettling, heartbreaking and satisfying. A++ would recommend. 
> 
> [Start From the Beginning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1930611/chapters/4169268) by [Everanon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverAnon/pseuds/EverAnon)
> 
> Also one of my absolute all-time favorites! Post TDW, Thor makes a deal and goes back in time to save his brother. The loop takes him back to the day of his failed coronation, which he lives again...and again...and again, trying and failing to keep Loki from dying. It has all the emotions, the characterization is SO GOOD, and there's some actually really interesting theories about the events of the first Thor movie worked in. Again, this is superb I recommend that everyone read it. 
> 
> Have a great day!


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